


Blue Period

by pene



Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 14:02:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4140453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pene/pseuds/pene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine and Kurt between "You know what, I forgot," and "There's no one else."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue Period

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Corinna, Fanci and Teach. This one was kind of a wrestle.

The apartment’s quiet. Blaine sits at the breakfast bar, among boxes and between rainbow striped wall and floor. He sips lavender and honey iced tea. He’s trying out some simple floral infusions in preparation for Summer. The silence still feels odd, like there’s a stranger in the room. This is the first time Blaine’s lived alone. He moved between his parents and Kurt and friends and Kurt and his parents and Dave. For a brief time he lived with Lara and Matteo from stage combat class. He didn’t know them well, but they had a spare room and no one can afford to pay New York City rent while spectacularly failing out of theater school.

He won’t be living alone for long, anyway. He’s already put up an ad on Craigslist for a roommate. Hopefully someone awesome will move in, someone who likes Brittany’s somewhat individual decorating style. Maybe they’ll play guitar and love Star Wars. They might even come with a small dog or a graceful, judgmental cat.

He offered Dave the place, of course. The rent’s pretty good and it only seemed fair. After all, Blaine’s the one who’s in love with someone else. But Dave wants to move so he's closer to Ohio State.

Blaine reaches for his phone. Dave’s packed the speakers along with most of his other stuff; he’ll pick them up over the weekend. But there’s plenty of songs that sound okay without a decent sound system. Maybe some Roxy Music.

The screen lights up with a text message from Kurt.

“Help! I’m trapped in the dance rehearsal from heaven (they dance better in hell, I assure you) Tell me all Dalton Academy’s secrets!?”

Blaine smiles at the screen. He types, “No chance, sweetheart.” Then he backs up to delete the ‘sweetheart’ and adds a smiley face.

It takes a few minutes for Kurt to reply. Rehearsal’s probably finished. Blaine mostly avoids wondering what he’s doing now, whether he’s meeting Walter at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Kurt’s so beautiful in the afternoon, with the bright sunlight catching in his eyes.

Anyway, Walter's handsome and he seems nice - kind of old, but nice. That’s a good thing. Blaine’s in love with Kurt, so while the thought of Kurt with someone else twists painfully in his stomach, most of the time he wants Kurt to be happy. 

They’ve been texting back and forth like good friends who haven’t promised one another the whole of eternity and then taken it back and then kissed, twice. It’s nice. There was a time when Blaine wondered if Kurt had stopped thinking about him at all. It’s good to know he does, even if it's just for show choir stuff and to tell Blaine about his dad in DC and the latest episode of _The Only Way is Essex_ and places online that sell discounted Burberry scarves that Blaine should check out. The deep red would look great with his Brooks Brothers jacket.

There’s an earlier message from one of the music teachers at Dalton. “Hey Blainey. Can you take over the band for me for a few weeks? I’m so, so swamped.”

Blaine almost types, “Of course. I’d be happy to.” But it’d be a lie. He wouldn’t be happy to. He’s new to teaching, he’s trying to find a roommate, he needs to hang out with his mom and put in some serious best friend time with Sam, and the Warblers have three performances coming up, not to mention regionals and nationals. He types, “Sorry, Priya. I really wish I could help. But I have no experience with band. And between the Warblers and helping Lou out with the musical, I just don’t have the time.” He reads it over. “Sorry.” he types again at the end, and adds a sad little emoticon face so she knows he does want to help. He likes Priya. 

He pauses with the phone in his hand before scrolling through the playlists. He’s proud of himself, proud of how he’s able to say ‘no’ these days, even to Kurt.

Blaine’s spent a lot of time in his life agreeing with people, doing what they ask or, even if they don’t ask - doing what he thinks they want, trying to look after other people’s interests. He couldn’t do anything about being gay. But he could try to be good and talented and unobjectionable in everything else. How could they not love him then?

In the end, that hadn’t protected him. Kurt had loved Blaine, Blaine had loved Kurt, and Kurt had left.

For a while, Blaine had tried to chase down what it was he’d done to ruin things with Kurt. But the more he thought about it, the cloudier it seemed.

His therapist said, “People don’t have to love you, Blaine. They don’t have to be in love with you. It’s not a rule.”

“But he was in love with me,” said Blaine. He shifted in his comfortable chair. “He was still in love with me.” He sounded stubborn, maybe even petulant. She tipped her head, listening.

“Okay. But even when people are in love, they don’t have to stay,” she said. “People are allowed to leave.” She watched him for a time. Her hair curled out from under a scarf in shades of gold and green. “That doesn’t mean you did anything wrong.”

That was worse. Because that meant Blaine just wasn’t good enough. And he couldn’t fix that. He looked away from her as tears swam in his eyes.

“It hurts,” she said. “I know. But it’s freeing too.” She was smart.

Blaine starts up the music. Bryan Ferry fills the apartment like an old friend.

He texts Sam to arrange a Marvel movie marathon. He can try the three-cheese popcorn recipe he spotted on the Food Network. Maybe the rosemary and sea salt too, though that’s less of a sure-fire hit. He pulls out his lesson plan for tomorrow. He has this idea about using theme songs from children’s television shows, stuff everyone knows, and mashing them up with something less well known. Some 1940s pop standards, perhaps. He thinks it'll be catchy with an a cappella arrangement. 

**

They’ve all done weekly dinner together for a while now. That doesn’t stop Blaine’s heart fluttering nervously as he knocks at the door. He’s the enemy, kind of. An outsider anyway. The only one at dinner who’s not working at McKinley. And things have changed. It's always been hard to see Kurt and not want to touch him. Now Blaine’s accepted that he’s still in love with Kurt, that he always has been, that it’s not going away, at least not in the near future. It's cleared his mind. But the revelation hasn’t magically brought them back together.

He puts on a smile as Ms. Pillsbury opens the door. “Blaine!” she says. “Thank you for coming.” Her face is warm. “This looks delicious,” she says as he hands over the salted caramel cheesecake he made and brought. She’s so genuine in her sweetness.

Everyone else is there already. Rachel and Sam and Mr. Schue are sitting at the table.

“Dude!” Sam says happily, “Dude! Lady Thor has a secret identity. Did you see?”

Blaine has seen, he’s read all about it, but he has to remind himself to answer because Kurt is standing across the room. He’s wearing slim fit chinos and an olive green v-neck that molds softly to his shoulders and waist. He’s as stunning as he’s ever been. He turns his head and meets Blaine’s gaze and the world stops. Blaine suspects it always will. 

“Dinner’s almost ready,” says Ms. Pillsbury. Mr. Schue gets up to help her with the spaghetti.

Blaine sits next to Rachel. Ms. Pillsbury takes the chair on his other side. While Sam and Rachel and Mr. Schue discuss Principal Sylvester’s latest Machiavellian hallway regulations, Ms Pillsbury smiles at him.

“How are you, Blaine?” she asks.

He’s not really sure how to answer. He’s newly single, and longing for something he can’t have. “I’m fine,” he says. “Really busy at Dalton.” That’s all true too.

Mr Schue looks across and speaks up. “Blaine. You know that Karof- David is welcome to come to our little dinner parties too,” he says.

Blaine keeps his eyes on Mr. Schue as he starts to answer, but he doesn’t miss Rachel’s wide-eyed glance at Kurt.

“Oh,” he says. “Um. Thank you-”

“All McKinley alums welcome,” Mr. Schuester says.

Blaine says, again, “Thank you-” He takes a breath. “But Dave and I. We’re not together anymore. We broke up.” There’s silence around the table. Sam’s looking at Blaine with his eyebrows raised. “I can pass the invitation on to him though,” Blaine says.

Rachel takes an audible breath. She says, “I hope you’re okay, Blaine. Break-ups are always so hard.”

There aren’t really any rules of etiquette that cover how to respond to that in this company.

He’s relieved when Sam says, “Hey, let me know if there’s anything you need, dude. You can come stay with me at the pad. I’ve got an awesome couch. I don’t quite fit on it horizontally, but it’s definitely long enough for you.”

Blaine says, “Thank you.”

Sam grins. “You are always welcome at Casa Sam."

Blaine feels everyone’s eyes on him. “Thanks guys. I’m really okay. Dave’s moving out. I’m staying on at the apartment for now.”

Across the table, Kurt is silent. It's like he hasn’t moved or breathed at all.

The remainder of the meal is filled with talk about last minute song choices and bringing a team together and Santana and Brittany’s upcoming nuptials. Kurt says almost nothing. Blaine feels his gaze, over and over, but whenever he looks up, Kurt’s eyes are lowered; he’s focused on his dinner.

While Ms. Pillsbury serves the cheesecake, Rachel puts a light hand on Blaine’s arm. “We all just want you to be happy,” she says. “Everyone wants that.” She speaks more quietly than Blaine had remembered she could.

This time when he looks up at Kurt, Kurt looks back. He’s still, and unreadably lovely. Blaine’s heart thuds steadily in response.

“Thank you,” Blaine says, to Rachel. “I think I am.”

** 

Blaine is sorting laundry in the bedroom, folding matching socks together with some level of satisfaction, and placing them neatly on the bed, when someone hammers at his front door. He heads down the hall to open it and is bowled over by a confusing, nonsensical, beautiful whirlwind of Kurt. Blaine’s wide-eyed as Kurt moves him bodily into the living room talking all the while about dates and weddings and love and being in love. 

“I mean, unless there’s- there’s someone else,” Kurt says. He stops to catch breath and looks around the apartment a little frantically, as though some stranger might be hiding behind a stack of boxes or under the lounge.

Blaine’s as certain of this as he’s ever been.

“There’s no one else,” he says.

He knows Kurt. He knows Kurt’s skin as well as he knows his own. Blaine takes Kurt’s face in his hands. He leans into him, opens up to Kurt's eager lips and arms and chest and hips. Kurt’s shoulders settle; his tension eases. This is home. It’s like Blaine said, there’s no one else. 

“Everything’s fine now?” asks Blaine, later as he takes a breath against the skin of Kurt’s long neck. They haven’t moved out of the living room, too busy making up for all the time they’ve wasted not touching one another. 

“Hmm?” Kurt blinks at him. His face is soft, his cheeks flushed pink and his lips faintly swollen. The striped wall and the light pouring in through the windows to catch his skin make him look like something Blaine made up in his head. Blaine knows better. There’s nothing that is as real as Kurt.

He aches to continue kissing. This is their forever, surely, and they’ve always been good at the kissing part.

Instead Blaine persists. “You said everything was messed up before, but now it’s fine," he says, shifting his body away. He ignores how much he longs to do the opposite.

Kurt squeezes his eyes shut with a tiny, worried frown. “I don’t know, Blaine. I don’t- I know I’m sorry that I messed things up.” He looks like it’s a test and he can’t remember the answers.

Blaine runs his hands down Kurt’s arms. Maybe it’s not the time. “We don’t need to talk about this now,” he says, soothingly, though there’s so much that they need to say. Not everything that matters is difficult, but this will be.

"Do you really expect me to make any sense of anything when you're finally this close?" Kurt asks, with a tiny, self-conscious laugh. “When I can finally touch you and let it mean something?”

Blaine shakes his head and looks at the floor, blushing. "I know."

The silence stretches out. Then Kurt looks away out the window. He steps back. Blaine feels the loss in even this tiny distance, but he knows Kurt sometimes needs his space to be able to talk. This is good.

"I’m sorry,” Kurt says, at length. He squints a little into the sunshine outside. “I’m sorry that I ended things like I did.” When he looks back at Blaine his eyes are bright and the words rush from him. “I let everything eat me up. It was because I wanted this.” He waves a hand between them. “I wanted you so much and I couldn’t see a way to make things better. There weren’t any options except leaving, or living with all that hurt and anger.”

“Anger?” asks Blaine. His voice shakes on the word.

“My anger,” says Kurt. He hesitates. “And yours.”

Blaine would rather do a hundred things than continue this conversation. At the top of the list is laying Kurt naked on the bed and sweetly and slowly taking him apart. But they’ve proven several times that going directly from the hard conversations to make-up sex doesn’t work. It’s mindblowingly good but it doesn’t keep them together. Not forever.

So Blaine nods. It’s all he can manage.

It makes Blaine sick to think back on that time in New York. It should have been incredible. He was supposed to take the city by storm. He was engaged to the most incredible man in the world. He was in school for music performance - the one place he’d always been safely admired. Everything should have been perfect. But instead he felt lost, ordinary and overlooked. While Kurt had New York in the palm of his hand.

Blaine wasn’t jealous of Kurt’s New York successes. Not at all. Kurt was amazing and Kurt and he’d worked hard to be where he was. Blaine glowed with pride to see it. But if Blaine wasn’t exceptional, too, if he wasn’t extraordinary on stage, then what was he? He’d always been able to count on that. 

The more he needed Kurt, the more distant and impatient Kurt seemed, the smaller and uglier Blaine felt in the face of that laser-clear gaze. Blaine couldn’t stop fighting over tiny things. He had to show Kurt all the ways Kurt was wrong too, all the things Blaine was putting up with to stay.

Blaine takes a deep breath. It doesn’t hurt as much as it once did. And this time Kurt’s here, watching him and waiting.

Kurt’s eyes are soft on Blaine when he speaks. “Blaine, it wasn’t all bad. Not at all. It was you and me, of course it wasn’t bad. We were amazing. You were amazing. You’ve become a legend in your absence. People still talk about you and your performances.” 

Blaine laughs and it gets swallowed in a tiny choking sob. He takes one of Kurt’s hands and draws him across the room so they can both sit on the couch.

Kurt turns so their knees touch between them. He says, again, “It wasn’t all bad.” This time he goes on. “But Blaine, we fought a lot. It wasn’t anything like I imagined- I mean, I knew it was going to be difficult. My dad told me there’d be fights about milk and coming home late, but I never saw that before. I didn’t know what it would look like. I certainly didn’t think it would make me feel-- so helpless.”

Blaine watches him. He thinks back. He knew how awful things were between them, though maybe he hadn’t felt they were in quite the state that Kurt thought they’d reached. It’s easier to be generous about it now, when he’s not right in the middle of it, miserable and watching Kurt turn on him. It’s easier to be generous, too, when he doesn’t feel like he’s the one dragging Kurt down.

He says, “It was tough. Rachel had moved to LA. Your dad was so far away and Finn-” He watches Kurt swallow. “Add to that, I was struggling, all the time. It was a lot for you to carry.”

Kurt nods. His lips are pressed together as though he’ll cry if he speaks.

“I’m sorry,” says Blaine helplessly.

Kurt rushes to stop him, reaches out a hand to the air. “No. No. You don’t need to apologize. It was hard for both of us. You’d moved back into a situation that put so much pressure on you the first time and it hadn’t really changed.” He shrugs. “I hadn’t really changed.”

Blaine says, “I sometimes felt like a completely different person in New York than I am here. Not all the time, sure. But still, that never went away. NYADA was hard; Sam had gone. And you- I mostly could tell that you loved me. You told me you loved me, I know. But I sometimes didn’t think you liked me all that much.”

“Blaine-,” says Kurt, hushed. “Always. _Always_.” Kurt’s silent for a long time. Then he says, “I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder.”

“I didn’t want you to be _kind_ ,” says Blaine quickly. He adds, more softly, “I didn’t want you to need to be kind.”

Kurt frowns. “It wouldn’t mean you’re less than the person you are.” He thinks for a time, running his hands along his thighs. “I love you so much, Blaine. I loved you. I wish that I’d been more patient and just better at it. I could have held on for a bit longer.”

“I don’t think holding on would have made it okay,” says Blaine, slowly. He imagines what staying would have been like, months more in that apartment that never really felt like Blaine’s. “Not just holding on.”

Kurt watches him closely.

Blaine stumbles over the words, “Kurt, I’ve loved you with the whole of my heart since I was sixteen years old. I think about you so much.” Kurt opens his mouth to speak but Blaine keeps speaking. “Even when I was back here and happy, I still had all these things I wanted to tell you or share with you. All the time.” Kurt takes one of Blaine’s hands, then. He holds on tight. “But I also, over these last months, I found out that I can be okay without you. I’m not sure I knew that.”

“You made it look almost easy,” says Kurt. “When I came back...”

He’s not resentful, just sad and maybe worried. Blaine hates that he ever made Kurt cry, even now after so many tears of his own.

“Oh no. No no. It wasn’t easy, though. Not even a tiny bit,” says Blaine. “But I built something when I thought I had nothing left. I was proud of myself.”

“I want you to be,” Kurt says. “I want you to be so happy. And you were.” Kurt swallows, hard. Blaine shifts closer to him. “What does that mean?” Kurt asks. His eyes are red-rimmed and heartbreaking.

“For us?”

“For us,” echoes Kurt. “What does this mean for us, now?”

Blaine says, “I guess it means we have time. We can take time and figure it out from here. I was proud of myself without you, yes. But honestly. Whatever it takes, forever, I’d rather be with you.”

Kurt leans back in the couch. He hasn’t let go of Blaine’s hand. He looks around the room as though he hadn’t quite realized where he was until now. 

“Is that your suit for the girls’ wedding?” he asks, nodding to a suit bag hanging off the bookshelf.

Blaine looks. “Yes.”

“You'll look incredible. I’m going to be so proud to be there with you.”

It feels easy to smile. “Me too,” Blaine says.

Kurt’s eyes flick to Blaine, quickly. “Are you scared?” he asks.

“Yes,” Blaine says. “Yes.” He’s terrified. This is all some sort of incredible happily ever after dream set among packing boxes and rainbow rugs, but they have been right here before. They’re back at the start. And last time it hurt them both.

Kurt says, “I’m scared too. But I’m in, all the way. Both feet and all of the rest of me.” He looks down at their joined hands then lifts his head. His eyes are blue on Blaine’s and Blaine would give him the whole world. “I’m going to do better,” he says. “Trust me. My whole life, there’s nothing I’ve ever wanted more.”

“So we get to do this thing,” Blaine says. And there’s a lot more to how he feels than scared. Awed. Turned on. In love. Happy.

“So we get to do this thing.” Kurt shakes his head, amazed. He lifts his free hand and carefully runs his thumb over Blaine’s cheek. “We take it slowly. We don’t let go.”

“Okay,” says Blaine. “Okay.”

“I love you,” says Kurt.

“I love you too.

Everything they still haven’t said sits there on the couch between them, but however complicated it will be, for now it feels like it’s shared. Blaine wraps his fingers around Kurt’s wrist and feels the strong pulse there. Then he pulls Kurt close.

*


End file.
